Ghost stories have multiple meanings, but one recurrent theme is
the challenging of order and rationality. The ghost is often an
unwanted return of what is terrible, marginal, hidden, or
forgotten. The spectral manifestation may represent the guilt of
the nation’s past or what has been repressed in the human mind. The
ghost is therefore responsible for bringing about a crisis in the
present, inviting social re-evaluation and political
reflection.

Fiction Now: Narrative, Media and Theory in the 21st
Century

As a form — material and generic -- the novel seems to have
survived the digital turn better than expected. But what is it like
to read books alongside connected devices, films, and updates? What
do novelists themselves make of this juxtaposition? And perhaps
most provocatively: if we were once hardwired to think of our
selves and our existence through books, how do books work now that
we are mediated by other devices?

The course will offer a cultural history of the ghost story,
examining the genre within its cultural contexts – linking it to
discussions of nationality, the guilt of Empire, and the discovery
of psychology. We will read ghost stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Charles Dickens, R. L. Stevenson, Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle,
Rudyard Kipling, and not least Edgar Allan Poe.

Fiction Now: Narrative, Media and Theory in the 21st
Century

In this course we'll read a very recent selection of US and
UK fictions alongside films and theorists of media and
(post)modernity. Texts will Include: Tom McCarthy,
Remainder, Ali Smith, The Accidental, Ben Lerner,
10.04, and Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love
Story, Jennifer Egan, Visit from the Good
Squad.